Visiting A Modern Day Slave Plantation --An Interview With Nancy A. Heitzeg (tags)
My interest in Angola is as both a paradigm of the Southern transformation of plantations into prisons and as a prototype for what we now call the prison industrial complex. Many old plantations in the South became prisons after the Civil War. Angela Y. Davis traces the initial rise of the penitentiary system to the abolition of slavery, writing: “in the immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern states hastened to develop a criminal justice system that could legally restrict the possibilities of freedom for the newly released slaves.”
This is not even Pop culture, its Popsicle culture. Regurgitated to meet the demands of a reality-based celebrity-obsessed cultural cesspool that defies the notion of depth. Andy Warhol's theory of fifteen-minute fame was conceived in a pre-ADD mind-set. Who can even tolerate fifteen minutes without being bored to death or achingly distracted? Unless, like with Arnie and Maria, our force-fed celebrity fix is constructed from disposable, non-biodegradable plastic.